Stochastic Spirals

Olympus E-620 January 10, 2012

My new site Stochasticspirals.com is up and serving pages since about 1:30 am this morning. 

I started a series of paintings last summer of red spirals on blue backgrounds, rendered on square canvases.

The same idea with a few variations over and over again, canvas size between 12 inch and 36 inch squares.

I use only three colors, Cadmium Red, Winsor Blue and Titanium White, mixing white with the red and blue but not red and blue together.

The spirals are painted first and then the background is painted in as negative space spiral.

The paintings are about random possibilities, about the marks made by hand, how the events of life can not be predicted, only analyzed after the act.

I photographed as I worked, documenting the life of the painting, the stages of complication, and abandonment.

I saw the de Kooning MOMA show several times and was most impressed at how he reached a state of luminosity in his work at the end of his life, creating a path to the other side.

I find abstract painting so different from photography but just as compelling and ultimately satisfying. The canvas begins blank, transformed into another dimension, a "Door of Perception".

One painting makes you larger,

And one painting makes you small,

But the one that another gives you,

Doesn’t do anything at all,

Open your own doors before you fall,

Just like Willem the Flying Dutchman,

Of Long Island showed us all.